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Posted September 19, 2012 07:23 pm

Golf Notebook

Furyk ready for all possible scenarios

Only two past FedEx Cup champions are in the field this week at the East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta: Tiger Woods, the 2007 and 2009 champion, and Ponte Vedra Beach resident Jim Furyk, who won two years ago.

All possible scenarios involving all 30 players in the field have been laid out by the PGA Tour. However, Furyk has a single-minded goal: Regardless of how anyone else plays, he has to win the Tour Championship to win a second FedEx Cup.

“I know I would have to win, and a lot of things would have to happen,” Furyk said on Tuesday at a news conference at East Lake. “But I’m never really worried about that.”

Furyk was 11th on the FedEx Cup points list entering the 2010 Tour Championship and a chain of events involving the top-10, plus his clutch up-and-down in the pouring rain at the par-3 18th hole, gave him a victory in both the tournament and the season-long points race, with more than $11 million in combined prize money.

This year Furyk’s odds are longer because he’s 18th on the points list. According to the Tour’s number crunchers, not only would he have to win, but each of the top-six players will have to finish anywhere from a tie for second to a tie for ninth.

Furyk said friends have texted him and asked if he knows what he needs to do.

“No,” he said. “It’s hard enough winning a golf tournament. I can’t control the rest.”

It’s not impossible. Bill Haas entered the Tour Championship in 25th place and won both titles. Haas didn’t make the Tour Championship this year and 2008 FedEx Cup champion Vijay Singh of Ponte Vedra also didn’t qualify.

Stricker honored

The Payne Stewart Award is give each year to a PGA Tour player, according to the Tour, “who shares Stewart's respect for traditions of the game, support of charitable endeavors and professionalism.”

Steve Stricker fits that description and earlier this week in Atlanta, he was presented with the 15th Stewart Award.

PGA Tour Commissioner Tim Finchem noted Stricker’s 12 Tour titles — nine since turning 40 years old — and the fact that he’s qualified for each PGA Tour Playoff event since the FedEx Cup began in 2007. Only Hunter Mahan has duplicated that feat.

Stricker has finished among the top-10 10 times in Tour playoffs and also has been a PGA Tour Comeback Player of the Year twice.

“Along the way he has excited fans here and all around the world with the way he’s handled those wins and the way he’s handled himself in those competitions,” Finchem said. “And we’re delighted that the committee came to the conclusion that Steve should be recognized.”

Stricker said Stewart, who died in a 1999 plane crash, and prior winners of the award were examples to him.

“The way I think I’ve tried to conduct myself over the years and try to set an example … lead by example … Payne did that,” Stricker said. “The guys that have won this award prior to me have done that. … To be part of that group is really special to me.”

We Are Golf is an organization that promotes the game and more important to them, tries to remove the elitist identity the sport has chafed under for years.

To that end, the organization would like politicians to stop giving President Barack Obama grief for playing golf.

As reported by blogger Matt Lewis of the website the Daily Caller, We Are Golf is trying to get Republican politicians — singling out Sen. Marco Rubio — to stop criticizing the president for his passion for golf.

We Are Golf spokesman David Martin told Lewis the group has written letters to Rubio and other politicians asking them for a cease-fire on golf jokes involving Obama — who recently played his 100th round as president.

“The golf industry is understandably sensitive to this line of politicking, because it reinforces misperceptions of the game that don’t square with the facts,” Martin said. “And because those misperceptions, in turn, have led to unfair legislation and regulation. How else to explain, for example, golf’s exclusion, along with massage parlors and liquor stores, from post-Katrina disaster tax relief?”

Notable: The leader in the FedEx Cup points list after the tournament will earn a $10 million bonus. The top five on the points list, Rory McIlroy, Tiger Woods, Nick Watney, Phil Mickelson and Brandt Snedeker, will win the FedEx Cup by winning the Tour Championship.